Libya has told the UN nuclear watchdog it wants to retain several nuclear facilities, including a uranium conversion plant the US wants to dismantle and transfer out of Libya, Western diplomats said.
"Two of the facilities are quite innocent but the conversion plant is a sensitive one," said a Western diplomat who follows the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
PHOTO: AFP
"Some countries don't want Libya to keep the plant. The US wants to take it out of Libya," the diplomat said.
Diplomats said the conversion plant in the North African state would likely be one of the issues IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei plans to discuss with senior Libyan officials during his two-day visit to Tripoli which ends today.
ElBaradei told journalists on his arrival in the Libyan capital that his team had been getting good cooperation from the Libyans and prompt responses to their questions.
"We've learned a lot through our discussions with the Libyans on the network of supply which, as you know, is also helping us in Iran and possibly in other countries," ElBaradei said.
"There is an interconnectivity between supply in Iran and supply in Libya," he said.
"I think we're coming to the conclusion that it's the same source of supply," he said.
Juma Alfarejani, the Libyan Foreign Ministry's director of international organizations, said Tripoli hoped to continue cooperation with the IAEA to ensure "Libya is empty of weapons of mass destruction."
ElBaradei's visit follows the release on Friday of an IAEA report on Libya's nuclear weapons program. The report said Libya's atomic effort began as far back as the early 1980s and was much more extensive than previously thought.
The 10-page report was the culmination of a two-month probe by IAEA experts in cooperation with the US and Britain after Libya agreed in December to renounce its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
The report said Libya had failed to declare sensitive experiments linked to weapons production, including "the separation of a small amount of plutonium," albeit "in very small quantities."
In addition to the creation of a few dozen centrifuges to enrich uranium for use in a bomb, Libya had purchased a pilot uranium conversion plant in the 1980s for converting raw uranium into a slightly more refined form.
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